﻿Let's say you have returned from vacation and you have shot a bunch of photos. It would be nice to create a DVD slideshow with those photos and watch it with your friends. In this guide I will explain how to do so in Linux. We are going to use Imagination, a lightweight and simple DVD slideshow maker in GTK+2. Of course it is free. So, install it through your distribution's package manager, apt, yum, pacman, whatever, and let's start!

This is the main window of Imagination.

Now press Slideshow > Import Pictures and load the photos you want to include in your slideshow. Here you can see the current image at the left, the slide settings at the right and the slides order at the bottom. You can rearrange images just by drag and drop.

Slide Settings

Select the Transition Type you prefer. There are many different types! You can also select the duration of each transition and how many seconds each slide will remain on screen.

Slide Motion

With slide motion you can zoom in the photo you want while the slideshow plays. To do so click Add to add a stop point, choose the zoom level and how many seconds this should last, go to the picture and select with your mouse the area you want to enlarge. Then click on Add again and another effect to zoom out. Repeat this as many times as you like.

Slide Text

Set a text you want to appear on the slide, something like a subtitle. Once again you can choose the font, font size, animation etc.

You can also select all slides and apply the same settings to them. A 5 or 6 seconds duration is usually good enough and you can choose random transition type.

You can also add music background in your slideshow. Press Slideshow > Import Music and load as many files as you want. There are some problems with Fedora and Ubuntu. You can read more at http://imagination.sourceforge.net/faq.html. Just a notice, if the music duration is less than the duration of the slideshow, well it will stop playing. It doesn't start over.

When you believe you are ready press Slideshow > Preview to see what your slideshow will look like. If everything is ok press Slideshow > Export > VOB (DVD video) and select the location for the VOB files to be stored as well as the Television format, 4:3 or Widescreen 16:9.

If you want to create Chapters in your DVD you can repeat the whole process many times. Each VOB file you export will be a different Chapter.

Now it's time to author and burn our DVD. I have already published two other guides describing how to author a DVD in Linux using DeVeDe and 2ManDVD. Read through them and choose the one you prefer!